Seibel: Do you think the number of women on that project was due toexplicit management policies—that they were saying IBM should hire morewomen?

Allen: I don’t think they said, “We must hire more women.” They justhired whoever was qualified, and it wasn’t just women. These were reallyhard times for African-Americans, and IBM really stepped out. One storythat’s not very well known is there was segregated housing in Poughkeepsieat that time, regarding blacks, and IBM got it changed.

Seibel: You told a story in an interview once about one time you arrived ata conference. And they looked at you and said, “Fran Allen?”

Allen: “You’re a woman.”

Seibel: “We have you rooming with Gene Amdahl.”

Allen: Oh, yes, that one. This was an IBM conference, when we weremoving the System Y project that was going on here to the West Coast intoproduct development and had renamed it ACS. We had a big conference atthe Harriman Estate across the river. It was all, with one or two exceptions,IBM people. There was a person from the West Coast who was chargedwith organizing it and he didn’t know any of us. He’d done it alphabetically.

Seibel: So they sorted you out and found you a room by yourself?

Allen: Yeah, a maid’s room up in the garret.

Seibel: Did you publish papers under Fran or Frances?

Allen: F.E. Allen. And I don’t recall why I did that. I think it was fairlycommon, at the time at least, to just use first initials.

Seibel: You also mentioned before that when you started, people thoughtwomen would be good programmers because women were thought to bedetail-oriented. These days the conventional wisdom is that it’s men whohave a bizarre ability to focus on things, usually to the detriment ofeverything else, and that’s why most programmers are men.

Allen: Right.

Seibel: You must have observed many shifts in attitudes along those lines.

Allen: Well, today they wouldn’t say great programmers, but they’re greaton teams because they like to collaborate. It shifted to women collaborateand they work together well. So that’s today’s analog of that earlierassumption that women were quite detail-oriented.

Seibel: Despite the number of women in that Stretch compiler group, youmust have also have had times in your career when you were workingalmost entirely with men. Was it a different kind of experience working in agroup with lots of women?

Allen: Yes. I think it was, but it was not only lots of women—a lot of mypeers were truly peers in the sense that they were mostly all the same agebecause of this big hiring that was going on at the point I was hired. Wewere pretty much all the same age and pretty much of the samebackground. So it was a very collegial group. And also, the whole area wasso new—so much was unknown. We didn’t know what we didn’t know, butit wasn’t as if there were a lot of people around us that had years ofexperience or knew a whole lot more.

Seibel: So what happened? The field is not full of women anymore; whendid that change?

Allen: It took me quite a few years to identify the cause. It happened in thelate ’60s, at least in the environments that I was in. I had left Research to beinvolved with the ACS project and went to California. Then I came back tothe Research division and found it a very, very different environment thanthe one I had left essentially eight years earlier.

There was a significant glass ceiling. There were processes in place, lines ofmanagement. And the management structures had changed and decisionmakinghad become much more formal, particularly about what projects todo and how to do them. And the number of women had changed and theposition of women in the organization had significantly changed, and not forthe good. And I was not happy about it, obviously.

In 1970, ’71, ’72, I was 19 years or 18 years into a career that was just full offun and opportunity. I never saw myself as advancing, but I felt I had thefreedom to do what I felt was right and to work on interesting things inroles that I would enjoy. And I came back and found out that wasn’t thecase.

Seibel: Do you think that glass ceiling had, in fact, been there before andyou hadn’t bumped up against it yet? Or had something changed?

Allen: It really hadn’t been there previously. Recently I realized what wasprobably the root cause of this: computer science had emerged between1960 and 1970. And it mostly came out of the engineering schools; some ofit came from mathematics.

And the engineering schools were mostly all men in that period. And thepeople IBM was hiring had to meet certain requirements: have certaindegrees and have taken certain courses in computer science. And so theywere almost all men because they were the ones that satisfied therequirements—because it was a discipline now. The other thing thatseemed to have happened is that it was a profession—there were a lot ofprocesses in place and chains of management that implemented theprocesses and kept everything running smoothly. So it was a very differentplace.

Seibel: I’m pretty sure sexism in society at large was pretty rampant in the’50s and ’60s. Yet in that period you were working in groups that had lots ofwomen in them. Why was it so open to women then?

Allen: Software was the newest-of-the-new stuff that was going on. And it’salso probably still to this day considered a soft part of the science. Andthat’s where women gravitated. Early on they were programmers on ENIACand at Bletchley Park. Women were the computers—that was their name.But in engineering and physics and the harder, older sciences there weren’tas many women. It was just divided that way, early on.

Then women started to come out of the engineering schools. Now theundergraduate percentage of women in engineering is somewhere around20 percent. Carnegie Mellon would be much higher than that—they havemade a special effort. But in computer science, it’s essentially 8 percent.There’s no domain that is as bad as computer science for women right nowin terms of numbers. “Bad” is the wrong word—it’s low.

Seibel: To play devil’s advocate, why does it matter whether we achieve,say, Anita Borg’s goal of “50/50 by 2020,” meaning 50 percent women incomputer science by the year 2020? Why does it matter whether this oneparticular field be representative of the population at large?

Allen: It’s such a transformative field for society as a whole. And withoutthe involvement of a diverse group of people, the results of what we do arenot going to be appealing or useful to all aspects of our society. A piece ofour challenge is to make computing, and all that it enables, accessible toeveryone. That’s an ideal. But it’s really where it’s going—the work at MITon the $100 computer and the way we’re trying to enable commerce at avery low level through computing in the remote areas of underdevelopedcountries.

Seibel: So clearly the closer you get to the end user, the easier it is toimagine that people with diverse experiences are going to bring differentideas about how those users might like to interact with a computer. Againplaying devil’s advocate, what do you say to someone who says, “That’s allwell and good when we’re talking about designing applications, but whenyou’re designing compiler optimizations, who cares about a diversity ofpoint of view?” Is it still valuable to have a diverse staff even when you’reworking on extremely technical aspects of software, like optimizingcompilers?

Allen: Yes. In fact, that was one of the keys to the PTRAN group. A lot ofwomen were attracted to the group, partly because there were otherwomen there already. But it also made the group a very congenial group.And it was because of the mix—it wasn’t because there were women there,but because of the mix. These people came from other organizations here,but also other educational backgrounds.